The News Of The Foz
Employment=Good & Burn The Bastards! 15/05/03 00:16
It's mid-May and it's still absolutely bastard well cold in my room - 23 degrees centigrade according to my phone. However other than that and the fact that my love-life over the past five months actually cannot be explained to a third party without the use of a flip-chart things are pretty good really. I'm in another call-centre temping job but this time with a major high street bank who actually seem to care about their workforce unlike my previous experiences with a major telecommunications company that was trying to fight its way out of paper bag but failing. The job is Mon-Fri, 11am to 7pm which is absolutely ideal because it means I can get at least four hours sleep beforehand but it doesn't finish late enough to interfere with my evening commitments. It also pays very nicely for a job in Swansea, which helps. So what does this have to do with the artwork then? Well I would be lying if I said I'd made any more progress on 'Pre-Life Crisis' because I so blatantly haven't. I guess I needed to actually leave my room for a couple of months and so I did and I've been a busy little bee DJing at student fundraisers and every Monday after the bands at Swanscene as well as developing my club/gig promotional interests. I have a new night devoted solely to classic feelgood rock starting on the 3rd of June at Barons Nightclub, which is going to rock and provide valuable sanctuary to those of us who like rock music but can't stand Nu-Metal (it's not new and it's not Metal, so why bother?).
I've also been busy encouraging my housemate and former Cult Of The Artist partner in crime Brian Cunning to pick up his brush and start painting like the celtic love beast he is and the results at present are looking pretty promising. Oh and thanks to my new-found regular income I'm able to buy t-shirts and hoodies from Spunky.co.uk again. Founded in the late '90s Spunky are to designer T-shirts what indie labels are to music. Artists submit their designs and if they like them they get paid a small fee and get their work exhibited on hundreds of young people all over the world, plus on the website. They even credit the artist on the card label that comes attached to the shirts when they send them through the post. I first encountered them when I staggered into their stall whilst really drunk at the Adventure Sports Weekender at the Bath & West Showgrounds near Shepton Mallet in 2000. Since then they've moved out of Somerset and into Brixton. Presumably either because Brixton is cooler than the West Country or because hash is virtually legal there.
Talking about illegal but widespread activities, I notice the RIAA are getting shirty about file-sharing software again. Now as an artist I can understand the need to protect your intellectual property rights. I mean no-one wants to work their arses off producing something only to have it stolen and freely distributed without seeing a penny in royalties. However, there is the big issue in our increasingly consumerist society of value for money. The companies that the RIAA represent have been guilty for over ten years of charging the person on the street extortionate prices for products that are 90% rubbish carelessly knocked out to fill space. In 1989 a normal LP would contain up to 60 minutes of music because that's what you can fit on an LP. In 2003 almost all 74-minute albums you pick up off the shelves contain a minimum of 14-minutes' worth of filler, many popular artists like REM have spent the last nine years churning out albums entirely devoid of any interest whatsoever, hell even Michael Jackson managed to do it last year. We get Pop Idol and Nu-Metal and tossers like Less Than Jake clogging up our cd-racks and a constant deluge of non-stop pap on the radio whilst very few interesting bands or groups get a look in. When I was a young teenager everyone talked about how you would be able to go into a record shop, choose the songs you wanted and then burn them onto a CD. That way you'd only get the songs you wanted to hear rather than blowing three week's pocket money on a CD full of filler, and that was so long ago even the Tories were still in power! Yet last year when I went into my local record boutique to buy a compilation album of the songs the pub customers I was DJing to wanted to hear the best they could do was the Now! compilations which contain 2 good tracks per 24 and go out of date within a few weeks.
In the past couple of years since the boom in affordable CD-writers the sale of CD albums has plummeted and the recording industry is wetting its pants. I say fuck them. Let them burn. The only people ultimately to blame for their diminishing sales aren't the Shaun Fannings or the James W. Fosters of this world, it's the big labels themselves for disappearing into a cloud of focus groups and ignoring the needs of the customers they've been stringing along for so long. The technology is now available for bands to record their music cheaply and distribute it globally themselves without a middleman but it's only being taken up slowly thanks to the industry's pre-occupation with lawsuits over research & development and the fact that the general public grew so pissed off with them they couldn't wait to cheat the system. Some people are the architects of their own doom and it's time the Big Five gave up the fight and had a radical rethink of their role in the 21st century music world.